Hysteria breaking out among warmists at Department of Energy

by Thomas Lifson

American Thinker

The global warming con may finally be facing a true reckoning.  For many years, the warmists have behaved as if they are hiding something, as the Climategate emails, among many other signs, revealed.  But so long as the greedy and power-hungry pols, lusting after taxation and regulation of all human activity via carbon taxes, could be reinforced by cowards afraid to buck the so-called scientific consensus (that doesn’t really exist) everything could remain hunky-dory.

While meeting with Al Gore calmed some warmist nerves, the actions of the Trump transition team at the Department of Energy are eliciting hysteria.  Darius Dixon of Politico reports:

Donald Trump’s transition team wants the Energy Department to provide the names of any employees who have worked on President Barack Obama’s climate initiatives — a request that has current and former staffers fearing an oncoming “witch hunt.”

The president-elect’s team sought the information as part of a 74-point questionnaire that also asked for details about how DOE’s statistical arm, the Energy Information Administration, does the math on issues such as the cost-effectiveness of wind and solar power versus fossil fuels. POLITICO obtained the document Friday, after Trump’s advisers sent it to the department earlier in the week.

These are perfectly reasonable requests. If your data cannot stand scrutiny, it should not be used.  That is one level of threat.  But this is what has got the bureaucrats and autocrats worried:

Coupled with calls by congressional Republicans to relax civil-service protections so that it’s easier to fire federal employees, the transition team’s demand that the Energy Department name names has some current and former workers fearing the worst.

“Sounds like a freaking witch hunt,” one former DOE staffer wrote in an email.

Needless to say, Democrats are spreading the hysteria:

Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, denounced the questions as “environmental McCarthyism,” calling them “a witch hunt and a loyalty test all rolled into one.”

“The transition team should reconsider these apparent attempts to intimidate Energy Department employees who were simply working to fulfill the climate objectives of the Obama administration,” he wrote.

To quote the current POTUS: “Elections have consequences.”

Those policies are subject to change, by administrative means and by changes to the law.

I can hardly wait to see the results of the questionnaire when they are released.  (Please, let them be released! Judicial Watch, take note.)  I hope for the appointment of a presidential committee to evaluate the evidence for and against the global warming hypotheses.  In the open.  Sunshine is what warms the Earth, and it is what disinfects junk science.

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher at American Thinker, calls himself a recovering academic. He graduated from Kenyon College, he studied modern Japan, sociology, and business as a graduate student at Harvard (three degrees). A Democrat by birth, Thomas became more conservative in adulthood as reality taught him that dreams of perfecting human society always run smack into human nature.